Power(31)

With it in his hand, I was at a distinct disadvantage until I could get my pistol aimed at him. In these close quarters, and with the speed he was displaying, I was not certain I’d even be able to do that.

I need some help here! I shouted in my own mind.

Enjoy the bitter taste of your own blood, Eve spat helpfully at me.

Aleksandr! I called in my own mind as I blocked a knife strike, slapping my assailant’s hand down. He altered its momentum by bringing it around in a circular motion that caused him to graze my belly. I felt my shirt rip and a thin slice of pain run across my stomach. I need fire!

Can’t, he said. You won’t be able to control it without practice, and in your present frame of mind you’re more likely to blow up everything in a three-block radius—

“Not helpful,” I muttered as I slapped away my foe’s gun again and he slapped away mine—with the knife. I felt the point run over my wrist and gritted my teeth rather than allow the scream of outrage and agony escape my lips. I breathed, hard, my fury lost in the searing feeling running down my arm.

I can help, Bjorn said, and I felt him step to the front of the line. I could see him clearly in my mind’s eye, and something came with him, some power that he held which would allow me to—

Oh, God—

It felt like a river of anger ran through my brain, carried on the flapping of crow’s wings. I could see the darkness it brought, the pain, the rage, and it all carried forward and out of my skull like it was blasting forth from my eyeballs. I knew it was all a construct of my mind, something that was happening in the inches between my ears, but that made it feel no less real.

It was the Odin-type’s War Mind.

I’d been hit with it before, once when I was fighting Bjorn and another time when I’d angered an old woman in a trailer house in northern Minnesota. It was a feeling of leathery wings slipping through your brain, foreign thoughts invading the space of your own—and it was damned distracting.

My opponent flinched under my psychic assault, his arms going slack for just a moment as he mentally batted away the bothersome murder of crows I’d sent swarming at him. He gasped audibly, as though he’d just pulled his head out of the water after a long submergence, his eyes unfocused, staring ten thousand yards past me at enemies I couldn’t see.

Neat.

I kicked him in the chest while he was powerless to block me and he slammed into the metal interior side of the van and bounced off into a waiting right cross from yours truly. It caught him in the—again, defenseless—jaw and I heard a crack. He sagged from the power of my blow even as his body pinwheeled from the force of it. I caught his tactical vest with my left hand and spun him once before throwing him out the open van door.

He didn’t gather his wits in time to even shield his head before slamming into the SUV right alongside, and I heard and felt him go under the back wheel of the van I was in as well as the SUV. Th—thump!

Victory is mine, asshole.

Reed jerked the SUV to the right, and I could see his head peeking up just enough to see the road in front of him now.

That was going to be fatal to him if the enemy fire continued for much longer.

I took two steps to the back of the van and jumped out the rear doors. Gravity left me once more and I flew like a dart, veering hard to the right, into the side panel of the last van with metahuman force. It rocked to the left as if the driver had jerked the wheel in that direction, even though I knew he had done no such thing. It was all me, baby.

I smiled at the thought of how I was dominating them. This was power. The power to—

The pain hit me in the skull like someone had cracked open my gourd and dropped a nuclear weapon inside before sealing it back up. There was a hiccup in my flight and I felt myself drop a full foot. I caught myself just before smacking into the pavement full force, gasping as if someone had just held me underwater for a minute.

I panicked, grabbing hold of the van’s side door in a frantic gesture. There was an odd quiet in my head, an empty space where the souls that had been aiding me had been only a moment earlier. I could barely feel Gavrikov, like a voice shouting in the distance.

I felt the power of flight start to drain from me, and realized I’d felt this particular sensation before, only days ago, when a telepath named Claire had paralyzed my body.

Now she was cutting me off from my power.

I hung on to the door of the van, my fingers tight around the steel handle, my feet hitting the side of the vehicle and trying, desperately, to find a foothold.

There wasn’t one.

My Sig Sauer fell uselessly from my grasp and I went for the door handle with my right hand as well, trying to cling to it even as the noise of the road and the wind rushing around me nearly deafened me.